Joseph Nicks

Look, I Don’t Know Much Of Anything

But, since you’re asking – 

and since I’ve been thinking about this shit 

for about as long as I think I’ve been able to think:

All of our seemingly unrelated issues

can really be traced back to a handful

of fundamental human errors,

both of theory and of practice.

One.  The “bottom line” always seems to be 

a monetary one.  What price can be affixed 

to humanity – and to the biosphere that it is 

merely a subset of?

Two.  There’s been too much emphasis on praying, 

pontificating, and protesting and not enough 

willingness to get up off our asses and our knees

(and down off our pulpits and our soapboxes) and 

put our heads, hearts, and hands together to do 

something about all the shit we keep blabbing about.

Three.  In all our escalating hyper-consumptiveness, 

we seem no longer to be able to distinguish between 

niceties and necessities.  How much do we really 

need – and are we even willing to go out and earn 

that?  There was a time when hot-and-cold running

water and flick-of-the-switch electricity seemed

almost more than we should expect.  Nowadays, we

can’t be content until Alexa draws our blinds and

our bath and breakfasts us in bed.  Do we really

need some fake female cybermaton to wash our 

dishes, take out our trash, play our music, tuck us in, 

wipe our asses, and jerk us off?  I guess if you’re 

some sleazy misogynistic good old boy who happens

to be an Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon alpha male exec 

the answer is yes.  The rest of us should be ashamed.

Four.  We’ve been too wasteful for too long – 

of time, of resources, of energy, of labors, and of 

lives – and our propensity for throwing things away 

instead of rebuilding, repurposing, or renewing them 

has left us wallowing waist-deep in our own waste.

We continue to choke off our airways, to fill the 

land with landfills, to shit in the fountain of use, so 

drunk on our detritus we just keep on flushing the 

toilet as if some gigantic high-tech benevolent turd 

fairy will just make it all disappear.  We’ve got to 

get over this fantasy-laden corporate business plan 

of unlimited growth potential, wanton discardliness,

and the premature obsolescence of last year’s model:

“How will we ever keep up when all the ‘Joneses’ 

around us have smarter phones than us?  We’re still

5G, fer chrissakes!”  We don’t even allow our own 

dead bodies to relinquish their nutrients back into 

the biotic reservoir they originally drew them from.

Think of all the resources being dammed up by this 

practice and the toxicity of all that embalming fluid 

that will eventually leach back into the soil.

Five.  Our increasing idleness and heightened sense 

of boredom with ourselves feeds our growing 

expectation of perpetual amusement and 

entertainment.  Blame that on all those wonderful

labor-saving devices the Industrial Revolution

bestowed upon us, and now on all the poison apps

that are eroding our ability to even remember, 

navigate, perform simple calculations, or come up

with original ideas of our own.  Have you been to an 

airport lately, watching whole families panicking 

around you because the batteries in their phones, pads, 

pods, and laptops are running low?  “How will we 

make it through four, maybe five hours without being 

plugged in??”, as you just smile and pull out an old-

fashioned paperback, a stack of papers to grade, or that 

poem you’ve been working on for a couple days now.

Six.  We’re so hung up on our tribalism, we’ve long

been rendered oblivious to who the real enemies are.

Your genealogy, your gender, your generation:  None

of these matter in and of themselves – and they never 

really did.  Do you honestly think humanity is seated 

squarely within any one ethnicity, era, or sexual 

orientation?  Have you not seen that every race and 

every sex and every historical timespan have had 

atrocities attributable to them?  Can you wrap your

head around the idea that it is class that draws the 

line between right and wrong?  That no one should

be having seconds until everyone has had firsts?

That prosperity begets poverty?  That the enemy is

the one who would take (1) what they don’t need,

(2) what they’ve not earned, or (3) at the expense

of someone else?  That the very desire to be one of 

“the haves” is as criminal as being one of them?

That religion, patriotism and which team you’re 

rooting for are even more irrelevant?

Seven.  Brace yourself now ‘cuz here’s the one that 

almost no one really wants to hear:  We expect to live 

too long and too well to be making this many babies.  

There’s a simple formula for it:  Fecundity plus 

craved affluence equals runaway hominism.  It is 

the single most pervasive human problem.  None of 

the above would be as problematic as they are were it 

not for this one.  I have to continue to ask this (it will 

likely be one of the questions I’ll be asking with my 

last dying gasps of breath):  How can we even think 

about bringing more hungry mouths into a world where 

millions of us are so deeply mired in poverty, disease, 

and starvation??  Can you name five more heinous 

crimes against humanity (and all of life) than this one?

So what the fuck is the point?  We might as well just 

give up any hope and simply eat, drink, and be merry 

until the whole infrastructure collapses on us, right?

The envelope, please:  Well, as always, there’s some

good news and some bad.  The good news is that it

ain’t rocket science, folks.  None of this shit is that

hard to figure out.  The trick is in the implementation.

Yes, we are pretty stupid animals (sapiens, my ass)!

But, though stupidity is an equal-opportunity 

affliction, it is also entirely curable by simply 

choosing to allow one’s self to be confused long 

enough to achieve some genuine degree of 

understanding.  Thinking is a lot harder than knowing.

It’s also as essential for progress as are perspiration,

callouses, and aching muscles.  Authentic answers are 

even more difficult to come up with than earnest 

questions.  Which brings us to the bad news:  First, 

we’re going to have to be willing to tighten our belts 

(which may just be the toughest part of all) and do 

without some of the unnecessities we’ve all gotten 

used to.  Then we’re going to have to mule up and 

strap in and pull together ‘cuz ain’t none of this 

gonna get done by election, delegation, or decree.  

We’re gonna get sweaty and smelly and sore.  We’ll 

grow hungry and thirsty and tired and cranky and 

argumentative and maybe even a little resentful.  But 

as long as we’re committed to the common good, to 

being able to go to sleep with a clear conscience, to 

shouldering as much of the burden as everyone else is, 

there’s just no way we can’t make this work.

I’m up for that.  

I’m down for that.

How ‘bout you?